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Watsonx: IBM's code assistant for turning COBOL into Java

(www.pcmag.com)
127 points Anon84 | 2 comments | 03 Dec 23 16:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.433s | source
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ufmace ◴[03 Dec 23 17:53 UTC] No.38509082[source]▶
The article title is clickbaity, but the actual point is the proposal of using LLMs to translate large amounts of legacy COBOL systems to more modern languages like Java. Doesn't seem terribly useful to me. I expect you could get a 90% solution faster, but the whole challenge with these projects is how to get that last bit of correctness, and how to be confident enough in the correctness of it to actually use it in Production.

But then all of this has been known for decades. There are plenty of well-known techniques for how to do all that. If they haven't actually done it by now, it's a management problem, and no AI tech is going to fix that.

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1. drewcoo ◴[03 Dec 23 19:11 UTC] No.38509802[source]▶
> I expect you could get a 90% solution faster, but the whole challenge with these projects is how to get that last bit of correctness, and how to be confident enough in the correctness of it to actually use it in Production.

Is the goal to get working systems or to generate support activity? Or to tank the systems and replace them?

> it's a management problem, and no AI tech is going to fix that

What if we replace middle managers with LLMs?

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2. dun44 ◴[03 Dec 23 21:43 UTC] No.38511056[source]▶
90% of middle management could be replaced with simple shell scripts; LLM would be a vast overkill.